Exploring, travelling, and nearly getting everything taken!

Asia » China » Guangdong
December 29th 2010

Published: January 26th 2011

Edit Blog Post

Ben Giles

AWESOME!!!

us posing for a loverly photo.

So, it's only been like a week, but it feels like so much longer...we've just done so much!!! After clare arrived, we spent a few days in haikou and had a slightly belated Christmas, which was lovely all the same, clare had brought out all of the prezzies from the fam...and 50 brownies...NOM!!! (it's a week later, and I only have 5 left...). We spent a day playing around haikou, had some lovely meals and introduced clare to the wonders which are 'xiao chi'. We also had a look around the meat Market near nanmen which had some absolutely ridiculous bits and bobs (see the pics!!!). The following day we went for a big explore on the motorbike (I'm calling it the Beast from now on)...again, see attached photos. It was absolutely amazing, we got to see loads of little places that hardly any foreigners will have ever been, and ended up in a tiny little minority village where no one spoke mandarin, which was a lil bit challenging, as we had no idea where we were!

The next morning (3am, after no sleep due to some last minute packing...my bad...) we said a tearful goodbye to my little room

Motoche!!

this guy was awesome!!!

for a whole 2 months...we were going travelling!!! We caught the train from Haikou train station at 3:59, and realised that the cheapest tickets on Chinese trains really aren't all that much fun... The train was promptly loaded onto a ferry...with a slightly worrying amount of juddering and jolting back and forth
and were off to the mainland!!!

Anyway, we got to zhanjiang, our next transit stop, and as we had 7 hours to kill, we got on the back of a motorbike and asked the driver to take us somewhere pretty. After some rather hairy driving through the oh so safe Chinese traffic, we arrived at a rather lovely park by the beach. Being oh so tired from the mahoosive journey, with no sleep, we decided to take a nap...bad plan...
I woke up to the muffled noise of fabric ripping, and looked around to see a rather dodgy looking Chinese man crouched next to our heads, over the rucksack. Upon noticing that I was awake, he immediately started to stroll away. My brain was still very much asleep, so I didn't really think about it, and it turned out that he had been trying to cut open

In a tuk tuk

Introducing Clare to the joys of tuktuks!!!

my day sack to take the stuff from the inside. Luckily Clare had wrapped her arms through the straps before we fell asleep, or I'm pretty sure that we would have lost our passports, money, and my iPad...among other important bits and bobs- scary stuff!!!

With not much chance of us falling asleep after that we went to a slightly dodgy restaurant, and then headed on to the train station, for our mammoth 19hour journey off to Kunming, and Yunnan! The train was HILARIOUS!!! We had bought hard sleeper tickets, which put us in stacks of 3 bunk beds with us both on 2 top ones facing each other, and a pretty interesting scramble to make it all the way to the top. It turned out that we were actually in the wrong beds at first so we had do move around a bit, but it was quite fun all the same, the beds weren't quite long enough for a lanky westerner, so I ended up sleeping with my feet sticking out over the corridor...must have been quite a funny sight! We also bought some truly horrible rice meal with bits of fish (I swear I got a fish